Annie Christie's To Die For:Episode Seven

Genre:DramaSwearwords: None.Description:The camera never lies._____________________________________________________________________​​​I knew he was there before I saw him. His bike was parked up, just where it had been the last time we stayed at the spot. The memories came back to me, happy and sad. I went right up to the bike, like it was an old friend. I’d convinced myself I’d never see it or him again. Unusually, Freddie’s helmet was sitting on the seat. He never left his helmet out, he was most particular about storing it in the panniers if he wasn’t wearing it. I went to investigate. And sure enough, he’d left a message for me inside of it.

‘Take a photograph. Send it to…’ and then there was a name and address in Germany. I didn’t really take in the rest of it, but I put the note into my pocket anyway. Was he playing a game with me? I didn’t know what to make of it all. I felt uneasy. Retrospectively one can call it a premonition, but it wasn’t that. I just didn’t know what was going on. But I was about to see Freddie again – and I had all but convinced myself that that would never happen. So I was more upbeat than anything. And he’d asked me to take a picture and send it somewhere – that meant he’d forgiven me for taking the picture of him the last time we were here – didn’t it?

Some things are impossible to prepare for. And what I saw was one of them. I walked into the forest, to the very place we’d been, camera in hand, hoping to get a picture of Freddie the moment I saw him, or more importantly, the moment he saw me. It was the moment I’d been dreaming of for weeks. Like I said, nothing prepares you.

He was there. At first I thought he was climbing the tree. I called out to him. I took a picture. Then I realised. He wasn’t climbing. He was hanging. From the tree.

I’d like to say I rushed towards him immediately. But I didn’t. I stood stock still in shock, unable to believe what I was seeing. And I was in such disbelief I reacted as he must have guessed I would. I took a picture. I know that sounds gross, sick even, but it was simply a knee jerk reaction. Something in me said that I was doing what he wanted and that as long as I was doing what he wanted me to I didn’t have to face up to the reality of this. He had to be alive. He was Freddie. I loved him. This couldn’t be what it seemed to be. It must be an illusion.

So I took the picture. I paused for the length of a shutter blink. Then I ran to where he hung. I wanted him to be alive. I wanted him to be j0king with me – showing me that the camera could lie.

He was dead. There was no doubt about that. Worse than that, he had my school tie around his neck. It wasn’t the only ligature, he had something more substantial, but it was enough to make me vomit on the spot. How could he have done that? I was overwhelmed by a maelstrom of thoughts, none of which made any sense. But the one that kept rising to the top was: How could he have done that to me? It was swiftly followed by – why did he do that? Then – I have to get help.

But I didn’t want to leave him. I still didn’t want to believe my eyes. I tried to pull him down. I found myself clutching his legs, pulling at his inert body, it swayed a bit, but I couldn’t shift him. I couldn’t climb the tree to loosen the noose. There was no point any way – he was a shade of blue I’d never seen in all his palette of paintings.

I was in shock. I was talking out loud to myself, repeating the words from his postcard. And the message in the helmet. ‘I’ve taken the photograph, Freddie,’ I said, ‘Now, wake up. Come on.’ I couldn’t believe this was the photograph he’d wanted me to take all along. It was too sick.

After what seemed an age but can only have been a couple of minutes, I was jolted into action, beginning to face the reality that he wasn’t playing a game, that this was real and it was the most terrible thing in the world. I ran from the place to raise the alarm. It wasn’t that I hoped he might still be alive, I knew he wasn’t. But now my eyes were blinded not by colour but by tears. I ran past the bike, for a moment thinking I should get on it and ride for help. But I didn’t have a key and I didn’t know how to drive it. And my dad’s car was waiting in the car park. The car I shouldn’t have taken and shouldn’t be driving alone and… this day was just the worst nightmare ever. I wanted to wake up. But I didn’t.

I suppose I was near to hysterical when I got to the car. Fortunately I didn’t have to get in and drive as a man walking his dog was there. He clearly saw I was in distress and asked me what was wrong.

Somehow I managed to choke out – ‘a boy – in the forest – you have to come and help me.’

I didn’t prepare the man well and he clearly wasn’t expecting what he saw either. As we ran back into the forest, he probably thought I was a rape victim or something. But when he saw ‘it’, he snapped into action and managed to get Freddie’s body down. As he was lying on the ground where a few weeks ago I’d seen him sleeping peacefully in his sleeping bag, I just lost it. I don’t remember much of what happened next.

The police came. They took away his beautiful bruised body. They drove me home. In my parents car. Luckily no one questioned what I was doing with that – I was too shocked to drive and they just took me home. My dad opened the door when he saw me coming up the path attached to a policewoman and he didn’t seem to clock that we’d got out of the family car, which I shouldn’t have been anywhere near. Everything was out of kilter and strange and nothing was making sense by that stage.

They sat me down, with a cup of tea of course, and started to ask me questions. ‘Did I know the boy? Was I with him when he did it?’

And that got me questioning myself - What did I really know about Freddie?

I told them he wasn’t my boyfriend. Well, he wasn’t, was he? When it came down to it I hardly knew him. I hadn’t seen him in over a month. I hardly knew him at all. I loved him. But I didn’t know him.

All I could tell them was that he had come to Kirkcudbright to paint the light. Beyond that nothing. I didn’t say anything about Werther, or Goethe, or Friedrich, or the colour wheel, or the Dresden Forest, or… or the name and address on the card he’d left me. Or the instruction to take a photograph. They didn’t need to know any of that.

My dad backed me up, though he must have known there was something odd. When the police asked me what I was doing in the forest, I simply said, I’d gone there for a walk, because it was a place we’d gone together. I hadn’t expected to see Freddie. I thought he’d gone back to Germany. I got away with it. The police didn’t know what questions to ask, and my parents didn’t want to ask questions that would distress me more – the elephant in the room was why I’d driven there in the car on my own in the first place. I guess everyone had their own theories on that one. But Freddie’s suicide was big enough to stop anyone wanting to dig into the whys and wherefores of my action.

My parents, who I suppose were scared out of their own wits at the thought of what might have been, didn’t push me to find out more. I guess they were just happy it wasn’t their daughter hanging on the end of a rope in the forest.

The police impounded Freddie’s bike. But they didn’t have a lot to go on. The next day they brought round his ‘belongings’ to see if I could make any sense of things. They had his passport and were going to try and trace his relatives, but they brought his portfolio to me, asking me if any of it made any sense. It was ‘evidence’ and I went through it with them – all the pages of blue skies, the sketches of the forest, a copy of Friedrich’s Chasseur in the Snow, which, bar the snow, was the obvious explanation of why he hung himself just there. They couldn’t see it, but then they didn’t know how to ‘read’ Freddie’s work. I was beginning to think I did. I was beginning to join the dots. All the random things he’d talked about now made sense. Especially when I saw that the portfolio had a note on the cover asking for it to be sent to Karlotta – at the same address I had in the note I’d kept in my own pocket. Karlotta was obviously the connection. And I realised that Karlotta was the girl Freddie loved. She was Lotte to his Young Werther, not me. He’d killed himself for her, not for me.

I have to say there was a mixture of a feeling of relief and anger when I worked that out. No one wants to have the death of another person on their conscience, but it made me angry that he’d used me in order to punish Karlotta. Because it looked like his suicide was an act of aggression towards her. Yes, it might have been desperation at an unrequited love, but really, when you think about it, take the teen angst out of the equation and it’s really an act of aggression. ‘You’ll be sorry when I’m gone.’ A temper tantrum of inestimable proportions. Designed to completely ruin someone’s life. If you loved someone, how could you do that to them?

In bald terms I was able to confirm to the police that I knew Freddie came from Dresden. That I had heard him speak of Karlotta. But that was all I knew. They took it from there. And we were left to get on with our lives.

It sounds trivial to say that the exam results came out the next week and I got 5 A’s. Much more than I expected and probably more than I deserved. My parents were happy. I was more numb than happy. It didn’t really register. I wasn’t really ready to make choices. My need to get away from Kirkcudbright had been overtaken by my need to get the flashbacks of Freddie out of my head. But decisions had to be made. My parents took charge and made sure I accepted the place at St Andrews. It didn’t seem to matter where I went next – I didn’t recognise myself or my life any more. I guess I was still in delayed shock.

Christy got 4 B’s and a D and decided to go to Edinburgh and get a job. Her parents were pushing her to go through clearing, and one day she just upped and offed. Before she went I wanted to talk to her about Freddie, but I found I couldn’t. She was tied up in the trauma of being dumped by Ian the Jannie, and I didn’t think it was fair to take her out of that weird normality into my world of bizarre reality. She’d never really met Freddie anyway, and the whole thing was way out of our joint experience. And, like Freddie, she left without saying goodbye. Strangely, at the time, I didn’t even care. I guess I didn’t want another person’s life on my conscience.

Everyone else kept away from me, like I was toxic. The girl who went out with the boy who killed himself was what would have been written in my school yearbook if we’d had such a thing. We didn’t. Kirkcudbright Academy isn’t Glee or even Heartbreak High or anything like that. For kids in Kirkcudbright life is boring and samey and real. And reality didn’t involve the experiences I’d just lived through.

My mum was sure that once I went to University things would get better. My dad wasn’t so sure. They fought it out in hushed tones when they thought I couldn’t hear. What to do with Heather? Mum suggested counselling. I didn’t like the idea. Apart from anything, they’d have to pay for it if I was to get help any time soon. So I decided to talk to my dad. It would be cheaper than counselling and hopefully less painful. I hated them for caring but I felt sorry for giving them this responsibility just when I should be walking out of their life. I thought when I left school I would be grown up. All of a sudden. Overnight. I was beginning to realise that growing up was a much longer process. I felt vulnerable. I felt guilty. I felt angry. I didn’t know what I felt.

Dad took me back to the place it happened. We sat and talked. I explained, as far as I was able, to him all about what now seemed Freddie’s obsession with Young Werther and his revenge on some girl in Dresden called Karlotta. The more I talked the more sick it sounded. You try and reason it through:

I met this boy. He got upset because the girl he fancied didn’t agree with his views on art. He believed in Goethe’s colour wheel. He was into 19th century sentimental Romantic art. She wasn’t. Nor did she want to go out with him. He decided he’d show her how wrong she was. By acting out the part of Young Werther and killing himself as an act of love and an act of art.

‘It’s sick dad, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘It’s way out of the usual,’ he replied, understated as always. ‘And what does this have to do with you?’

‘He used me,’ I said.

‘How?’ dad said.

‘To find the place he would kill himself,’ I said. ‘That’s obvious, isn’t it? It was all just about finding the perfect place. He didn’t care for me at all.’

‘I don’t think that’s true,’ dad said.

‘So what’s your explanation?’ I asked.

‘You got caught in the crossfire,’ he said. ‘You were an unexpected consequence.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘And I thought I loved him.’

‘You did love him,’ dad said. ‘The problem is, when we love people first without knowing them. That’s bound to lead to trouble, don’t you think?’

And of course he made sense.

‘But you’re young,’ dad said. ‘It’s not the first love I’d have wanted for you, but you will get over this, Heather. You will go on and love. And you’ve learned a valuable lesson.’

‘What’s that? I attract boys who want to kill themselves?’

‘You need to get to know someone before you give them your heart.’

I couldn’t believe that was my dad talking. I mean… dads don’t talk like that.

And he was right. As we sat there together in the forest, and I realised that this time I was sitting next to someone who really loved me, someone I could trust with any secret. So I told him about the photograph. The one Freddie had asked me to take. And send to Karlotta.

‘And have you?’ dad asked.

‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘How could I do anything so awful. They must have told her by now and…’

‘But perhaps you need to see the whole picture,’ dad suggested.

I never knew this man had so much wisdom in him. He was just my dad, after all. Just a man who drove an oil delivery van, who’d lived all his forty years in Galloway and… and until then I’d sort of thought that unless one had experienced ‘the world’ one had nothing of value to contribute to it. I realised in that moment that it’s not where you go but how you see that matters in the long run. My dad might not be a traveller or a painter or anything like that, but he was a good man. A man who saw straight and acted honestly and always did the best for his wife and children. A man who knew what love and life were really about.

And I knew that I had to find out more about Freddie, not leave him in my mind as some confused part of a summer I didn’t understand. Some of it had been about me, but a lot more hadn’t and dad was right, I did need to see the whole picture. I knew my mum would hit the roof with my suggestion, but as I sketched it out to dad, I knew that it was the right thing for me to do – and that he would support me all the way.

‘I’ve got my Inter-railing money, mum,’ I said as we sat round the kitchen table – making the decision. Suffice it to say, as we’d both anticipated, she wasn’t happy with the idea.

‘I’d feel so much better if Christy went with you,’ she said. I nearly laughed out loud. Dad put into words what I was about to say.

‘I never thought I’d hear you say that,’ he said.

‘Well, I just mean, it’s a long way to go on her own, and it might be…’

Mum couldn’t get her head round her chick flying the nest further than the East Neuk of Fife, a place with gowns and a history and security. It might be the East Coast but it wasn’t a world away from Kirkcudbright after all. Whereas Dresden might as well be the moon. It wasn’t that long since it was East Germany after all. You didn’t even need to add in the Freddie element to make my mum very uncomfortable about it.

‘What are you trying to achieve?’ she asked me, struggling to understand.

‘It’s just something I have to do,’ I said.

‘How will meeting this Karlotta…’ she began.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just know I have to do it.’

But I didn’t really know if I had to do it. I knew I had to give myself the chance. But even as I boarded the ferry I didn’t know whether I would actually end up on Karlotta’s doorstep. It wasn’t the Inter-railing adventure I had planned – but Freddie had changed all my life-plans the moment he met me.

Dad had managed, I don’t know how – he really is a remarkable man – to convince mum it was something I had to do – that I needed closure on Freddie and this was the way I’d chosen. I suppose she had had more years than I had appreciating the wisdom of the man, and so finally she agreed. As long as I promised to be back in time to start University – and ‘kept in touch’. I agreed to both parts of the deal. They took me to Dumfries for the first stage of the journey.

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About the Author

Annie Christie is a pretty ordinary person, except that she was born Annie Christie and then married a man called Christie and so is still called Christie despite having taken on her husband’s name. She sometimes wonders if she should have called herself Christie-Christie: but who would believe that?

Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.